Many thanks to ATI and Matthew Tippett in person for granted
RADEON X800 XL.
The card was packed in medium-sized upscale case with a set of various cables (including HDTV).
400/1000 MHz speed and 16 pixel pipelines provide excellent shader performance.
Better quality and speed of OpenGL operations and Linux drivers make me glad :).

Having some experience of communication with UPS, I thought that the delivery should go on as usual (2-3 weeks).
But russian representative office of FedEx surprised me a lot.
As usual, the card arrived in Moscow in two days.
After that it was delivering for 50 (fifty!) days crawling with enormous delays.
Association with russian FedEx gives the impression that they are bored to death with delivering something.
You could try to phone them for a week without a success (nobody is answering all day long).
As a result you could get to know that: "the officer is on leave and I know nothing about your cargo..."
At that I had to pay $180 for customs clearance and papers.
Anyway I was happy that the card was delivered at least not for a year.
5 feedback messages

Part of Unigine code is available under GPL license for educational purposes or to be used in open source projects.
New scripting system (Unigine scripts) is fully compatible with old one but drastically faster.
Performance tests of Unigine scripts are available at
Unigine site.
Scripting integration is very easy.
This scripting system is a base of new GLSHell v2.0, which has not only increased speed, but new 'Mesh' class with hardware support of shadow volumes and EXT_framebuffer_object extension support.

Hardware IFS fractals,
with 20 million of points per second rate.
Coords are calculated by pixel shader and then are readed by vertex one from
RGBA32F_ARB texture.

GPU raytracing.
A plane, 5 spheres, a light source with shadows, recursion depth is 4.
At that we have 15 FPS for GeForce6800GT at 1024x768.
There are 60-65 FPS at 400x300.
Tracing speed is at the level of 9 million of rays per second (reflected rays are not taken into account).

Simple technodemo: per-pixel subsurface scattering of light.
Diffuse light component is rendered into lightmap space.
Further passed and scattered light is calculated on the base of 3D lockup texture (128x128x256).
Calculation is not exactly correct from the physical point of view, because it's a simple exponent approximation ;)
Scene is rendered using ready light map.
The demo actively uses dynamic branching so it requires GeForce 6 :)
Without subsurface scattering it looks very
ugly ;)
Also you can download a little video (2.1Mb).
SubsurfaceScattering.tar.gz 352.4 Kb | 197867 downloads | 6 feedback messages

Never trust programmers about deadline of a project ;)
6 month gone and 1Mb of code was written...
Planned functionality of Engine_v0.3 was overfulfilled and there will be a lot of features in future ;)
But Engine is no longer an open source project.
All information about it could be found at official Unigine site.
Frustum.org will live and nothing terrible will happen ;).
In a month it will be moved to a new hosting, so there could be short-term connectivity problems.
17 feedback messages

Realtime soft shadows of 4 sources of light.
It kills previous generation cards but works good at new ones, FPS is about >50 :)
It looks real awesome :) Shadowing basis is old lightmaps but calculations and smoothing are made by GPU.
It's a simple render into lightmap space, bluring takes place there also. Then a ready light map is used.
Each light map component corresponds one source of light. Thus the 4 sources bluring costs nothing.
Owners of ATI cards could download a little video (4 Mb),
because this demo doesn't work with ATI, though it have to ;)
LightMaps.tar.gz 1.5 Mb | 197867 downloads | 13 feedback messages

31.12.04 Yesterday I've finished in the rough all of the render's functions, which were planned in Engine_v0.3.
Right now only optimization should be done and render will be completed.
New features were added: 2D and Cubemap mirrors (either static and dynamic),
scene refraction throught transparent objects and particle systems.
Because of incorrect scene scale the gravitation is equal to g=4-5, I've forgotten to increase it again :).
Physics with g=40-50 (it's like a Jupiter, huh) works correctly.
You can see new render in this
movie (640x480, 14 Mb).
Happy New Year for all! Let it be better and more creative than 2004 ! :)

All of the good of Engine_v0.2 is here, other things are rewritten >:)
Rewrite process tooks 5 months and there is some incomplete stuff still.
Session in the University comes closer, I have less free time in the end of the year.
Unfortunately I have no time for new demos. Release of 0.3 version postponed till next month or two.
Right now the Engine is in the working condition (68kb of shaders, 970kb of cpp|h files, 56kb of scripts).
You can download demos of beta-version
here (640x480 39Mb) and
here (320x240 15Mb, VERY low quality).
3 test scenes (graphics is at the "Cubes vs Spheres" level) contain:
indoor/outdoor scenes; hardware stencil and depth shadows;
point, cubemap modulated and directional lights; systems of particles; flares; HDR; physics and 2 fortuitous bugs :).
Other features of the Engine, which are absent in demos: 3D sound, hardware skinning.
There are no downloadable sources because it's a raw beta >:)
All of test scenes and the Engine itself are controlled by scripts like
that.
35 feedback messages

Great thanks to
NVIDIA
for the
GeForce 6800 GT
, and especially thanks to Keith Galocy and Great Britain NVIDIA office.
This splendid card surpasses my old
5800
for 2-4 times.
I had the same feelings when I switched from MX to FX family :)
FPS is exceeded in all of the demos and all of them are still without nv40 optimizations :)
The card has excellent overclocking potential - it runs without problems on 400/1100 MHz
(I didn't tryied further tests).
I have 300W power source (PowerMan) and there is no any troubles with power (AthlonXP 2500+, 2 HDD).
So, I could recommend it to everyone ;)

Some "warm" words about
UPS:
27 September I received a phone call from Moscow concerning the load from Great Britain.
I was informed that I had to pay rather large customs duty.
So I was shocked a little and moved to the Tomsk custom-house,
where I got to know that goods costing more than 300$ could be
delayed during transfer (I guess UPS has collusion with customs).
A week later UPS had sent bills to me (customs duties $125 + UPS service $65).
Transferring money throught banks took another week.
As a result a passage from Moscow to Tomsk lasted 18 days and costed $190.
18 feedback messages